Can searchers find your store locator pages in the organic search results? Probably not! But Best Buy’s customers certainly can. Why them and not countless other retailers?

Store locators, those online features that pinpoint a company’s physical store locations, are essential tools to enable customers to make their way from a website to the brick-and-mortar world to make a purchase or handle the merchandise. Ironically, many store locators are not optimized for organic search. Instead, local branded searches bypass the brand’s site and land on Google Maps, Yelp, CitySearch or one of the many yellow pages sites.

If you have a store locator, you’re probably in the same boat. That local branded traffic belongs to you. It’s your brand; you deserve to win those branded searches! Don’t you? According to Google and Bing, not really. Frankly, Google’s and Bing’s own results are a lot more optimized than most store locator pages, and a lot easier and more self-serving for the engines to rank well. To beat them at their own game, your store locator needs to very well optimized.